Most phones, computers, televisions, and similar user devices are currently designed to be used by a single user. This design limitation is not consistent with many intended uses of such user devices. In particular, many use cases exist whereby one user desires to share their user device with another user device. Such use cases exist in business environment as well as the personal-use environment.
As one exemplary use case, two or more co-workers may have scheduled a conference call with a third user. The co-workers may decide to meet at one of the co-worker's offices and share the user device within that office. While some phones are provided with a speaker phone capability to facilitate use by multiple users, no other features of the phone are altered to accommodate multiple users. Moreover, no multiple-user feature of the phone is known to automatically react to the presence of two or more users within proximity of a common user device.
As another exemplary use case, two or more friends may decide to watch a movie or television show on a single user device. While some televisions provide a picture-in-picture function, this function has to be manually invoked by one of the users. There is no currently known capability of the user device to detect that it is being utilized by multiple users and automatically alter its interface to accommodate the multiple user utilization.